As well known to those skilled in the art, Paragraph 1 of Section 2 of Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point (HACCP), established according to the mandate of the Enforcement Decree of the Food Sanitation Act, defines HACCP as ‘standards to control in priority each process in order to prevent any dangerous or injurious matter from being mixed into food, and to prevent food from being contaminated throughout the entire process of the raw material control, manufacture, process, cooking, and distribution of food’. Further, according to international food standards (Codex) established by the Codex Alimentarius Commission (CAC), which is operated by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in conjunction with the World Health Organization (WHO), in order to promote the international trading of food and pursue the health preservation of consumers, HACCP is defined as a ‘system for identifying, evaluating and controlling hazardous factors important to food safety’. In this way, referring to several definitions of HACCP, HACCP is a prevention-level concept that ensures and guarantees the safety of food products or food items by continuously managing food throughout the entire process, including the manufacture, distribution and consumption of food, rather than a concept that ensures safety through the inspection of final products.
There is a probability that food hazards to human beings exist in the entire process ranging from the step of producing raw materials of foodstuffs to the step of serving consumers with food on the table. The entire process is the field to which HACCP may be applied and is currently being applied, and methods of most efficiently and safely managing hazards have been systemized through the process. Recently, HACCP has been used for all processes, including the manufacture, processing, cooking and distribution of food, in food production and processing companies, facilities for providing meals, large-scale distribution companies, food service chain restaurants, hotel restaurants, etc. In the above large-scale distribution companies, HACCP has been introduced and implemented for food management.
However, the operation methods used by most companies have been mainly performed through manual operations by managers. Since the number of food items and the number of management steps are excessively large, a manager cannot carefully observe the rules of HACCP. Due thereto, there may frequently occur the case where the observation of the rules of HACCP is falsified.
Further, in places in which raw materials are preserved or cooked, such as large-scale restaurants or facilities for providing meals, sanitation is particularly important. In large-scale restaurants or facilities for providing meals, it is currently prescribed that materials be managed on the basis of HACCP rules and that HACCP reports be periodically drawn up. Therefore, at the present time, in large-scale restaurants or facilities for providing meals, managers regularly measure the temperature, humidity, etc. of various types of kitchen appliances or warehouses for storing materials, record the measured data in the form of reports, and then draw up HACCP reports, but the actual number of mangers is insufficient, and it is very inconvenient to manually draw up HACCP reports. In particular, in large-scale places, the case where managers draw up false reports, without precisely observing preset rules, may frequently occur.
Further, conventional management of kitchen appliances has been performed by focusing on only temperature and humidity, and, recently, the management of pH, water activity, etc., has been conducted, but the management of odor sensors, capable of determining whether decay has occurred, is not still conducted everywhere.
Further, there frequently occurs the case where, when problems occur in kitchen appliances or food warehouses in the absence of managers, prompt measures are not taken, so that the status of food sanitation is deteriorated, and food may need to be discarded in large quantities or may be cooked in a bad state, thus threatening the health of people eating the food.
Further, in a conventional sanitation system, there is an attempt to collect environmental information and realize automation by applying various types of sensor equipment to specific places through a wired or wireless Local Area Network (LAN).
However, there are problems in that, when trouble occurs in the system using a wired LAN, excessive costs and time are required from the standpoint of maintenance, and in that, when trouble occurs in the system using a wireless LAN, the mobility of a terminal cannot be provided, and thus it is impossible or limitedly possible to connect to the wireless LAN during the movement of a manager. Further, there are problems in that, since the wired and wireless LANs are operated using a commercial communication network, communication costs are incurred, and in that, since wired and wireless LAN equipment is expensive, excessive installation costs thereof are incurred.
In addition, a manager processes inspection and inventory management when food items are delivered, and such processing must be manually conducted. Since it is impossible to individually ascertain the expiration dates and storage methods of respective food items, there is a high possibility of erroneously applying storage methods to respective food items. Further, when inventory management is performed by manually and individually ascertaining the expiration dates of food items, expiration dates may elapse and thus corresponding food items may be discarded if inexact expiration date information is written or if the writing thereof is omitted.
Accordingly, in order to solve the problems of the conventional sanitation system, the need to apply a further improved access method, capable of efficiently managing the sanitation of kitchen appliances, precisely managing food and solving the problems of the wired/wireless network occurring in the conventional system, to a sanitation system has increased.